I’m running the Boston Marathon two weeks from today.
Fourteen days.
I started training fourteen weeks ago.
Of course back then I didn’t plan on getting a letter from a lawyer telling me our house was going into foreclosure about ten weeks into it.
I had big plans before that letter.
This will be my fifth marathon in three years.
I did New York in 2013, Hartford and Cape Cod in 2014, and Boston in 2015.
Boston was such an amazing experience last year, not just running the race but the time I had with my friends and family, that I applied to run it again this year with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Because I’m not very fast.
And if you don’t know much about marathons, Boston is like THE marathon for marathoners. But you have to qualify with a certain time to get into it.
Unless you run for a charity.
I haven’t qualified.
Yet.
So I applied to run with Dana-Farber again.
They accepted me.
When you run the Boston Marathon with a charity, you have to raise $5000.
Between the New York City Marathon in 2013 (I ran that one for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society) and the Boston Marathon last year (I ran that for Swim Across America) I have raised over $10,000 for cancer research.
That’s pretty awesome!
So I didn’t think it would be that big of a challenge to raise at least $5000 again this year.
But I also didn’t anticipate having to devote so much time to Tyrone in the last month.
That completely threw me off track in both the training and fundraising department.
So it won’t be the marathon I had hoped in terms of time.
My fastest marathon time was 4:37 in New York.
I really wanted to go under 4:15 this year.
It’s not likely at this point. I haven’t put in even half the training time I wanted or needed to.
So I’m basically winging this marathon and hoping I can finish it without medical assistance.
While I’m probably not going to run a best time like I had wanted, I’m still really looking forward to it.
Because after everything we’ve been through in the past couple years, I kind of feel like this is the culmination.
One final test.
I want to prove to myself I can do this.
And I want to do it for my brother.
Of course, I could use your support.
Both on race day and in the donation department.
If you’d like to contribute to my fundraising page, CLICK HERE. All the stuff I had planned on doing to raise money in the past month kind of fell by the wayside while I concentrated on the house.
(100% of all donations go directly to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Plus, it’s a tax deduction.)
If you can’t support me that way, but want to give me a little push on race day, my bib number is 26994.
The weekend of the race I’ll have more info and you can track my progress during the race.
I’ll need all the positive vibes behind me that I can get, and just as you’ve traveled the journey with me over the past few years, it would be really awesome to have all of you there with me in Boston on the 18th.
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